They wave Iain and Emily off on their travels with silk scarves that fly like banners, handfuls of rice and more animals than is surely normal. Harry the lizard lies jewel-green and lugubrious as ever on a newel post, but the goats, cats and otters have their say, singing and bleating and twitching pink noses as the car pulls out of their drive. The mynas have learned a Bach chorale from Bernice since Una has been away and take the opportunity to show off their new avian harmony.

Afterwards, Una and Robin make the trip to Keppel Harbour. It wasn't the original plan, but Percival Curtis came through and as of his last wire, Iris will arrive on the absurdly British-sounding Victoria Rose.

That is how Una finds herself in Keppel Harbour, Singapore, the day the Victoria Rose limps into port. She and Robin watch the molasses-sluggish progress of this little tin boat as it traverses sloshing grey water. They sky is a grubby grey like soiled silk. The water turns this into a roiling, churning slate that plashes muddily against the docks. There's an interminable interval in which time feels suspended. The boat rocks in place, the only activity the lasso-toss of the ropes over the sides. When finally the gangway lowers and passengers begin to disembark, Una's fingers pulse painfully inside her gloves.

Una watches the disembarkation and prays not Yeats but the stuff of staunch, grateful Presbyterian prayer. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Rejoice in the Lord alway: Again I say rejoice. This is the day the Lord has made…

At Una's elbow Robin plays improvised hopscotch. Somewhere along the way she picked up the kind of white, pebbled stone popular with children for this purpose and now throws it haphazardly, hopping right-left, right-left, two paces forward, two back. As Una's feet begin to chill and throb, she has half a mind to join in. Instead, she raises a blue-suede glove to her eyes and scans the horizon. Time flattens, then grows gravid as Una wonders if she will recognize Iris. The girl she sent off with Li was a willow-frond of a thing, thinner than Robin is now, hunger-pinched and wishbone-delicate. That was in March, 1942. Eight whole years ago – almost nine. Anything might have happened.

Eyes cold-reddened and squinting, Una spots the all-purpose grey button-down of the ACS coat attached to a girl – young woman now – with almond eyes and her mother's pointed chin. Una's heart leaps heavenward, and her gloved hand drifts to her scarf and under her scarf to the silver fish that circle their blue heart.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone…

Now she has.

'There, Robin,' she says and points. 'Look!'

Abruptly Robin halts her game.

'Iris!' says Una, and wonders as she calls out to her, if Iris remembers her. For a moment longer than eternity Una thinks she doesn't. That between the war and Malaysia and the ACS, her girl forgets the aunt that sang her asleep and kissed her seven times goodnight for luck, and took her to the cinema at the Capitol, and sometimes the Alhambra to give her parents a night to themselves. Then comes that firecracker smile, and a whirlwind of coat and long ACS-mandated skirts as Iris barrels towards them.

'Auntie!' she says, and all but collides with Una. Una's arms go out and around bony shoulders and hold them fast. Iris was tall for nine, but at seventeen she feels oddly diminutive the way Li is diminutive. Una buries her face in the all-purpose grey of Iris's coat and smells sea, rain and travel. Then Una pulls away to hold Iris at arm's length and look at her.

Still a willow-frond of a girl. Definitely Li's stature and straight-backed bearing. Stiffer maybe…Did the Ipoh ACS learn the Japanese bow then? Did the peninsula? What happened? Questions can wait. Una looks at those eyes like inky moons, Cecilia Meredith there in their shape. At the point of Iris's chin, and her hair, pulled back with the severity of all the ACS pupils. But that smile – how could Una ever have thought she wouldn't know it?

Iris seems to be making her own study. Finally she says, 'You loved Papatee.'

'That's right,' says Una. 'I fed him on my way out to the school.'

'Not Puck, though,' says Iris. 'You were always scolding him, and…I think Daddy said that was why Puck liked you, because monkeys liked – is hierarchies right?'

'Yes,' says Una, and she hugs Iris close again. 'Exactly right, Firecracker. I remember that too. Because monkeys liked hierarchies and Puck knew I was at the top of ours.'

Then the sustain pedal behind Una's heart stutter-stops, because Puck is dead, and how can she possibly tell that to Iris, here in the nacreous Saturday morning light?

Una can't. Not here. Puck would hate it, the cold and the noise and the mizzle gradually turning to rain. Una cheats, and segues into introductions between Iris and Robin. Elise English's Irish green eyes stare wonderingly at Iris's darker almandine ones. How much, Una wonders, is Iris myth to Robin, and how much girl? There were nights, back at camp, after Elise died and talking of her burned painful-hot in Una's throat, when she whispered Robin to sleep with stories of Trinity House. Told her about a woman with a waterlily smile and a man who collected wild and wonderful animals, and a girl that hung the moon. How the man and the woman and Una too would do anything for this slip of a girl and her monkey, the way Una now does anything and everything for Robin.

'And the monkey is Puck?' Robin used to say, there on the cusp of sleep.

'That's right, little bird,' Una would say. It was a sort of ritual between them.

Robin turns those green, heart-stopping eyes on Iris and says with the casual carelessness of newly eight, 'Mama told me all about you.'

For a fraction of a second, perhaps less, Iris looks at Una, but it's not the anxious censoriousness Una acclimatized to long ago. Just her Firecracker's perpetual curiosity.

'Oh?' says Iris, dropping to one knee and coming level with Robin. 'She's going to have to tell me all about you to make up the difference.' That firecracker of a smile again. Robin returns it. Iris says, 'I always wanted a sister.'

She did, too. Una remembers this, because for a while it seemed all the other children had them. Well, had siblings, but Iris appeared to be of the opinion, aged six, that brothers were for other people. She had Puck for that. Una smiles at the memory.

'Do you remember what your mother used to say when you asked?' Una asks Iris now.

'No,' says Iris, and a frown tugs at her mouth and knits her forehead. The sight of it coils serpentine around Una's chest and squeezes. But she says lightly, 'She used to say one firecracker was more than enough trouble.'

'That's right,' says Iris. She laughs, sunburst-sudden. 'And Daddy would say we can only win the lottery once.'

Una hums agreement.

'And you…' says Iris. Una watches her scrabble for this trace memory. 'You said that you'd sell Puck to the highest bidder if you had to wrangle any more harridans.'

'That's right,' says Una.

'You would have sold Puck?' asks an incensed Robin.

'Never,' says Iris. 'Auntie wouldn't have let Puck leave if he wanted to. She just said it to wake Daddy up sometimes.'

'Oh, so you knew that did you?' says Una. She pulls Iris closer, tucking one slender, chilled hand into the crook of her elbow and puts her other arm around Robin.

'I'm terribly clever,' says Iris, grinning Puck's grin at her aunt. 'Everyone says so. You said so.'

By mutual agreement, they spare each other their private horrors until they are back in Canada. Travelling is exhausting enough, Una thinks, without fracturing your soul on the edges of After You Left and I was so afraid. Instead, Robin chatters about Kiki, and Iris about the Trinity House menagerie. Una and Robin regale Iris with stories of her cousin's wedding. How Iain looked unlawfully smart considering his usual get-up was a half-step above perpetually scruffy, and how this retrospectively justifies Una's failure to recognize him when she met him way back at Raffles. How despite the unlawful smartness, he wore an otter like a stole through the service the way any other soldier wore military dignity and principle, and how, like Carl before him, he let Harry the lizard play boutonnière. Robin makes them laugh with her impression of the silver-spotted cats haring after Bernice's hens at a crucial moment in the ceremony. Una contents herself with describing the goat that wouldn't leave Emily's side, the rabbit on her shoulder and the way the mynas became an avian choir for All My Hope on God is Founded.

'I think,' she tells Iris, 'that's why they picked that hymn. So the birds could join in.'

Finally in Kingsport, Una takes them back to Innisfree, still sunnily yellow even on the greyest of days. Iris smiles at the sight of it. She lingers at the gate and traces her free hand around the cursive script that proclaims the house's name.

I will arise and go now, she murmurs.
And go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there,
Of clay and wattles made…

'You remember that?' Una can't help the incredulity. She has no memory of reciting it to Iris. Other things, yes. Of singing, sometimes hymnody, sometimes I've Got Rhythm, sometimes, before it got too painfully accurate to contemplate, I've Got Plenty of Nothing. Of playing piano and watching Iris dance like a starburst, Puck at her heels. He was younger then, naturally. Or combing out that long, thick rope of hair and stumbling through Northern Cradle Song while Li tried not to laugh. Maybe a bit of Hansel and Gretel of a soft blue Sunday evening. When at night I go to sleep… Una sang it like the prayer it was.

Iris says, 'Of course. There was a teacher at the ACS – he taught it to me, after I asked. I remembered that before…You said it when you pinned your poppy. Or sometimes in September… Mama said it was your ghost-poem. For remembrance. Because you couldn't light candles in temple. And I think…I think sometimes you said it while driving. If Puck and I were too…'

'It was probably the car on my nerves, not you,' says Una and gives Iris's elbow a squeeze. Iris gives her a look that says she knows better; It's Li to the letter in one of her intuitive moments. Truth be told, Iris may be right; Iris and Puck were a combination even Ate in her mischief couldn't compete with. But Una hadn't lived lives then, didn't know better. Looking back at it, she wouldn't change the wild, dervish-whirl of those misadventures Iris and Puck had for anything.

Indoors, Iris sheds her coat and not for the first time Una's breath catches, because it is as Percival Curtis said. There is a necklace at Iris's throat and Una would know it anywhere as the twin to her own. It features an imperfect ruby at its core and around it circle three silver fish with slim bodies, and spiked tails. They form a a piscine oroboros as they leap mouth to tail to mouth. Una thinks she will never get used to seeing it on Iris.

Mothers give jewellery to daughters all the time. But the last time Una saw those fish and that ruby they were snug at the throat of Li Meredith, and at the time she stoutly refused to let Una gift Cecilia Meredith's locket to Iris because it was for when she was a lady. Give it to her after, Li had said. Una's soul writhes and quails like a snared fish at the thought of what hideous thing must have happened to make Li forgo after and give Iris that necklace then.

Iris's hand wanders half-unconscious to those fish, and with a jolt Una recognizes it as her habit. Strange, seeing it in Iris. What happened? hangs, a suspended chord between them. Una doesn't ask; She watches Iris move through Innisfree ghost-light and lizard-lithe. She goes with her arms extended, hands skimming off of everything. The soft, worn plush of the fading navy sofa, the honeyed wood of the coffee table, the battered leather of the rolltop desk, the blue and gold macaws. She drifts water-smooth into the kitchen, and there's a sound like a sob that brings the Innisfree trinity – Una, Robin, Kiki – to the kitchen. Iris has one of the red tea bowls with it's butterfly stencils in hand. Of course she has.

'What happened?' she says, fingers tracing the delicate stamp of the butterfly.

'It's all right,' Una says. 'The other eight are in Singapore. I left them in safe hands. Robin and I took those two with us when we came here to keep Trinity House close. And for luck, in case we needed it.'

Iris nods understanding. She sets one tea bowl down and picks up the other. She traces that stencil, too. They are, after all, no two the same. As she does it, Una watches the maths catch up with her.

'Nine,' she says. 'I remember we lost one, because the Japanese killed it – ' and how right she is, Una thinks. Li threw that tea bowl into the fire, but only because the fear of God and the apocalypse was on her in the shape of a Japanese flag flying from the Cathay building.

'But that leaves nine, Auntie.'

Robin opens her mouth, but Una stays her with a hand on her shoulder. Gently she lifts the tea bowl out of Iris's hands. No need for the death of any more heirlooms.

'The ninth Singaporean tea bowl,' she says as she sets this one on the counter, an incarnadine gem on a greyling day, 'is buried with Puck at Trinity House, next to Papatee and Nenni.'

'Oh,' says Iris. 'I never thought – I knew he was old. But I thought…'

Una holds out her arms and Iris falls gently into them, an arrow flying home. Robin joins them, slender child-arms wrapping delicately around Iris's unfamiliar middle.

'Mama wouldn't leave home without him,' says Robin. 'We stayed at Raffles ever so long with Puck, and then we came home, and then Puck died…'

'And that's when you left,' says Iris. 'Auntie – Raffles – what happened?'

'You first,' says Una. There are family clamouring to see Iris; Rosemary is half-starved for the sight of her, Faith and Jerry are dying to meet her. There is a jumble of curious cousins that leap like trout at the mention of Iris. Some of them - Christopher, Mandy - have children themselves these days. Vividly Una recalls how naked and exposed she felt as she and Robin groped, stumbled and careened desperately towards normalcy. Remembers the hot prickle of eyes jarring Robin-ward, the explaining, and explaining until Una was cyanotic – Nellie's word – and exhausted with it. She remembers the doctor-scrutiny of Bruce and Faith and all the many, many medics and this is not what she wants for Iris. And selfishly, Una needs this, to know how the child she sent to Mainland China arrived at Horley Hall, Ipoh, second arm of the Anglo-Chinese School.

'Sit, Firecracker,' she says. 'And try not to let Kiki do anything untoward. I'll make tea.'

'Kiki,' says Iris, 'is the parrot?'

'It's a long story,' says Una, even as Robin tells it. Una switches the tap on and over the spluttering of the water, Una faintly catches the girls' chatter. The serpent coiled tight around Una's chest unclenches. Once she witnessed the end of the world, this is true. But it didn't look like or sound like this. It was barking dogs and bombs, and Li screaming unthinking and terrified, They will kill us, Firecracker.

Murrrderrr! Shrieks Kiki. Van Amburgh is the man…Up in the air the junior birdsmen…Iris laughs the silvered laughter of her mother and Robin isn't far behind. It's a jocund cacophony that sends windchime-ripples through the air. Iris joins in the chorus of Van Amburgh's Menagerie. It's miles from the end of the world.

When Una reappears, the girls sit lotus-fashion on the floor. Iris's idea, presumably, because typically Robin sprawls, limbs akimbo across the worn blue sofa with its fading plush. Iris used to do that too. Lotus-sitting was something Li did after they lost their furniture. Una drops down and joins them. Kiki flutters onto the teapot and then off, shrieking fury at the heat of the boiled water inside. Reflexively, Robin reaches out with a ring of pineapple to soothe her comrade-in-arms.

'Now,' says Una. 'What happened after I sent you to Safety?'

Iris's hand strays again to her fish and their ruby. As Una pours out aromatic jasmine tea, Iris describes the jolting, jostling journey in the cattle carts. How hot it was, and how they counted the ruts in the road until they lost track. How impossible it was to sleep, and how Li held Iris tight and cradled her until they got to the peninsula. How she sang the songs Una used to. I've Got Rhythm, When at Night I Go to Sleep, All My Hope on God is Founded.

Some of the Australians helped get Iris and her mother to a boat. Briefly, everything seemed fine.

'Only, they were in the water, Auntie,' says Iris. 'The Japanese. One minute Mama was singing me to sleep with one of your hymns, and the next a man was speaking into a machine telling us to get up on deck because it was an emergency.'

Oh God, thinks Una. She knows this story. Dozens upon dozens of women told it her in camp. Of how they set out for England with the best of intentions and no one thought of the torpedoes lying in wait. Why would they? The Great British Navy was going to protect them. Some drowned, and some swam, and some washed up on islands that became little hells on earth. The thought that this is what befell – But no, Una thinks. Iris is here. She was in the Anglo-Chinese School at Ipoh, so presumably…

'It's okay, Auntie,' says Iris. 'It wasn't…There were these nuns, who boarded with us, and one of them grabbed me, and one grabbed Mama, and they sort of towed us up onto the beach.'

'Were you all over blisters?'

Iris's eyes widen. 'How could you…'

'Never mind, Firecracker. You tell it your way.'

Robin hunkers down, her head in Una's lap, and Una combs her ringed left hand through it reflexively. The radio plays Serenade in Blue sinuous and close as a lover's kiss. Una finds her other hand is at her throat, silver fish under her fingers, the echo of Iris, and her mind, reflexive as her hands, reaching for Yeats.

I went into a hazel wood
because a fire was in my head,
And cut and carved a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread…

'It wasn't so bad at first,' says Iris. 'It was hot, but we got under the shade of the trees and some of the women beat coconuts down. We had a terrible time opening them, but Mama…'

'She had a knack,' says Una reminiscently. Iris nods. 'She knew how to drill in and get the milk out. So, we had that at first, and fruit, because that was up on the trees too.'

Una listens as Iris tells them about climbing into the dense jungle shade to escape the sun, and how one of the nuns wrapped Iris in her habit at night to keep the bugs off. The rush of gratitude that hits Una has the unexpected intensity of a stray electrical current. It zings through her as the image of Elise English, delirious and dying, bubbles to the surface of her thoughts.

Around the third day, they began worrying about food and boats. Someone said they would signal the next boat to come through, and they trekked back down to the beach to do it. They built a fire and when a boat came they waved the nuns' wimples like flags.

'Only, it wasn't a British boat,' says Iris. 'So we ran back into the jungle, and the nun that rescued me, or maybe Mama, but one we knew, anyway, Sister Julian, caught her foot on a scorpion and it killed her. Then the men came ashore, and so we – I mean the ones of us who weren't injured or sick or anything – climbed trees. I got up fast, I guess because Puck and I were always doing that, and lay flat on the branches. I remember because the leaves tickled and the bark hurt. My chest and my knees, you know?'

Una does not know. Climbing trees was for other people. But she imagines Robin well knows, because from her semi-recumbent position she flashes those green eyes at Iris.

'And your mother…'says Una, and hesitates.

'Mama was fine,' says Iris. 'I didn't know she could climb like that, except those times we raced into the attic…She told me after the men left that she used to do it as a girl. Climb over all the roofs in Chinatown. Sometimes she took her pencils…'

'She sat on the roofs, sketching,' says Una. 'I forgot she told me that. It was how she got to know all those birds by name.'

'Yes,' says Iris. 'Anyway, the second boat was British. But there was a fault with it – the engine maybe? – No one told me. They couldn't take us back to England like we wanted them to. Well, Mama wanted to go to China, but I think she'd started to realize maybe…'

That maybe China wasn't Safety, Una thinks. Yes, she can see that. She's thought it herself long since, as the international headlines glower at her over the breakfast table. She looks at the accusatory bold type of headers like Civil War in China or Nanjing Atrocities and thinks God in Heaven, why did I ever send them to the mainland? Why didn't I go with them? What was I thinking? Li knew better. Thank God.

'They wanted to take us back to Singapore,' says Iris. 'One of the nuns sort of inflated herself. It was incredible. She was this short, round woman like a balloon, and all the time on that island I don't think I ever heard her raise her voice. She didn't then, either. Mama was spitting like a cat and Sister Perpetua was doing the best impression of a Roman Candle I ever heard, and this little balloon-woman walked up to the Captain and gave him a look like thunder. But she didn't shout. She said, soft as you like, soft as you when you're angry, or Nenni or a lullaby, 'Young man, if you take these people back to Singapore they will die and you will have that on your conscience the rest of your life. That might not bother you, but it will bother God. So, unless you want to face Eternal Damnation – ' and you could just hear the capitals, Auntie, even lullaby-soft like that, 'turn that boat around and go back to Malaysia. Then you will take us up country, because I've heard it's safer there. Maybe it isn't, but me and my God will do our level best to see it is.''

Despite herself, Una smiles. She does not know this nun, but she is impossibly, immeasurably grateful to her.

'And he did?'

'Just like that,' says Iris. 'He guided us up country, too. They weren't bombing, way up there, because of all the jungle. That was when Mama gave me this.' Her fingers tug at the necklace.

Iris describes their stay with two elderly Malaysians. Their son was an engineer; Iris remembers because it reminded her nine-year-old self of George Cazalet and his fixation on all things motorized.

'Not at all,' says Una, 'because you were fond of George Cazalet.'

Iris squeaks and swats cat-fashion at Una and goes on with her story. She talks about how the elephants used to wander past some mornings and they would feed them, and how Li said, 'Your father did that.' Una knows to expect this though, because she was with Carl on that holiday. It was horrible – Una's word, not Carl's – but she remembers distinctly the way he fed bananas to passing elephants.

'She left you with them?' says Una. It's not really a question. She knows Li, the way she thinks and feels and works a problem. Probably this saved Iris, given what Naomi has since uncovered about the Japanese occupation of Ipoh and Kedah.

'It was supposed to be temporary,' says Iris. 'Mama said she would go to the Mainland, and send for me if it was safe. She gave them money to look after me, and a bit extra for the fare when it was necessary. Then she gave me the necklace Daddy gave her that night,' and Iris's fingers twist childishly around it here, the cord winding tighter and tighter between them until it makes a cincture at her throat.

And, thinks Una, though Iris does not say it, Li told them to send Iris to the Anglo-Chinese School for an education, because that was where her aunt would look. Then, arrow-swift on the heels of this thought, Forgive me, Li. It should never have taken that long. But I was half-starved and alien to the world, and mothering someone else's girl instead of ours.

Probably, Una realizes obliquely, the necklace was to pay for the school. It might have too, right up until the moment Percival Curtis caught sight of those fish, realized Iris was Una's niece and declined to accept them.

The floor is uncomfortable. Una feels the strain of kneeling like this in her back, in the humming buzz of her knees as they go numb under Robin's head. She pulls Iris into a hug anyway. 'Firecracker,' she says, 'I'm sorry I was so long finding you.'

'It's all right,' says Iris. It isn't, though, and Una hugs her tighter. Iris says, her voice muffled against Una's breastbone, 'It wasn't bad. Not at all, even. Your friend, Mr. Curtis – he was always good to me.'

Una tries to remember Percival Curtis with the ACS children and can't place him. He's not like Mrs. Bowen or Miss Mackay; The former so severe she never garnered a nickname or clownish impression from her pupils, the latter too much like a violin, ready to be played upon. In Una's memory, Percival Curtis exists only in the haven of the staff room, perpetually marking, sometimes quoting poetry, occasionally offering Una the security of an arm to walk on. Or else – strange thought now – in the beating heart of the city, dressed for an evening out and reciting Shelley, half-playful, half-reverent. Una is unspeakably glad that he was there for Iris. If he did not cherish her the way Una and her family did, he kept her safe. That is the main thing.

'Now it's your turn,' says Iris. She sits suddenly upright, and pulls Una with her. She tugs Una onto the sofa and soon they are all in a jumble there, save Kiki, who hops and clucks among the remnants of the tea on its tray. She leaves pineapple-sticky, claw-footed impressions in her wake.

Una cannot possibly tell Iris about camp life. About how Elise English died, or Nellie bowed with the exhaustion of the overburdened, but soldiering on anyway. Nor can Una touch on the hours she spent sewing uniforms. The way the run-down sewing machines whirred and blistered her fingers and how, because Emily had never sewed a thing in her life, she always sewed her fingers together until Una sat at her elbow and taught her.

Neither can Una talk about the food rotting in the sun or the blackness of Stella Bowen's swollen tongue in her final, bloated death throes. It is bad enough for Iris to talk of torpedoes and islands and last promises. Worse to hear Robin's casual reminiscences of the violence she grew up with. To say of the playground blows she brings home, Oh, that's nothing, Mama. Not like what the guards did to you. To know the world harrowed the woman Iris thought sprung to ready-made adulthood…That would never do. Even supposing Una could tell Iris, and she can't, Li would never forgive her the telling.

Robin saves her. She says, 'Remember the quilts, Mama?'

'Quilts?' says Iris. Una can't blame her the incredulity. Looking back, it seems as incredible as it sounds.

And yet, the women quilted. That is true. It started because someone organized Girl Guides for the children, and then, in the middle of the sewing badge realized they had a way to communicate with the men's camp. So, that's what they did.

Bernice quilted a Canterbury Cross. Almost. Where INRI should have gone across the arm of the cross, she wove in her initials and Robert's. So that Robert Allerstone, who knew his Bible, would know Bernice was not dead, she stitched Luke 24:5-7 at the foot of the cross. Just that. No elaboration. Robert, being a minister, would know his Gospel. Why seek ye the living among the dead? As it turned out, it was Robert who was dead. Una omits this detail.

Cressida took one look and said, 'Bloody morbid, that is.'

'Luke,' said Bernice, 'was my Robert's Confirmation text.'

Confronted with an unimpressed, atheistic Cressida, Una said into the silence, 'Walter's was John. He recapitulated it beautifully. Like poetry.'

Walter recited John like a spell. Nothing that sacred should have sounded that bewitching, and not only because as texts went, John was dense. The funny thing is that telling Iris that is easy. She squeals at 17 exactly the way she did at nine, because Auntie Una is supposed to be a stayed, sane constant, and not given to love affairs. Robin is equally indignant.

She says, 'You aren't supposed to notice other people!'

'It was a lifetime ago, little bird,' says Una, and laughs in her turn.

'Other people?' says Iris.

'Am I telling you about these quilts, or not?' asks Una.

Nellie quilted a wobbly caduceus. Nestled under the wings of the staff was a kangaroo on the right and orange Eleanor flowers on the left. Una hopes the woman who taught Nellie medicine, the one who got Joan her job at St Aiden's, saw it.

Cressida thought the whole thing was pointless. Why would she want to send a message to her awful relatives? What good would knowing she was alive do them? This is what she said with considerable asperity before piecing her family's improbable crest, just in case. Three dachshunds couchant confronting a badger rampant. The thing looked half drunk and the tension was a mess. The motto, Una recalls, was No Folly Unappreciated. Cressida stitched that, too. No one could have doubted it was her.

Elise stared utterly blank at her block. Now Una understands this is because there was no family to send encoded messages to. No great-aunt in England or parents in Ireland – only a priest who tried and failed to help her.

Maybe, Una thinks, telling Iris none of this, they should have realized then, about Elise's family. Elise wouldn't quilt and wouldn't quilt until her fingers were tremor-raddled from malaria. Then she quilted feverishly, an imperfect pelican on a scrap of linen. The beak cut into it's breast, gouging the number that Una now thinks was the number that awful Laundry assigned Elise in girlhood. The pelican came from Fr. Sowerby's altar cloth. Una has seen the frontal. That didn't go on the quilt. They kept it separate. It lives on Robin's dresser, the only earthly thing Elise could leave her girl.

Joan couldn't understand how they could stand it, quilting after all those hours of thrum-whirl-thrum of the sewing machines. But she liked the respite from the sickbay that piecing and stitching gave her. So, Joan sat down of an evening and pieced a red hospital cross. Above it was a crown, and beneath it a sword, these for the saint she was named after. If you looked, you could just see Joan's name, Dr. Joan Makori threaded through the lattice-work of her crown. She had the most mathematically precise stitching Una ever saw.

Emily quilted in Chinese. If the Japanese asked – which they never did – she would swear blind these characters were Loan Stars or Windmills or whatever block took her fancy and dozens of women would have backed her. Actually, Emily quilted her name, the word for Hope, for Spring and Faith. She threatened to quilt verses from Essays in Idleness and the women clamoured affected horror. Then they fell about laughing.

Occasionally, when there was fabric spare, they quilted real quilt blocks. When the women died, for instance, Cressida quilted Crosses and Losses, daring anyone to point out the hypocrisy. No one did. Because Cressida couldn't piece for toffee, Bernice sat down next to her, mute, and pieced it with her, so that these memorial blocks would not be as crazed and drunken as the message block Cressida quilted. This Una neglects to tell Iris.

She does tell her about Joan's beautiful Stepping Stones block.

'Murder to get right,' she says. 'Your grandmother and I tried it once, when Jims was young and our war was younger, and halfway through we swapped it for Bear Claws because we couldn't make those squares and triangles work.'

Also because by then Jims was older and Walter dead, and Una couldn't see without those little kaleidoscope-rainbows tears conjure, and Rosemary was too gentle to say she knew. This is also easy to tell Iris. She squeals again and Una smiles.

'And you?' says Iris. 'What did you piece?'

If Una closes her eyes, she can picture the shape of it, the triune petal clusters, the delicate bend of the flowers, the long, thick leaves. The swoop of a bird on the wing. Carl, obviously, never saw it. She takes a deep, steadying breath through her nose and squeezes Iris's hand.

Una says, 'I thought of you, and I quilted irises. And under them, little red robins.'